www.jstor.org/stable/2584636

Reproductive Control in Apartheid South Africa

[quote]The state-sponsored family planning programme officially began in South Africa in 1974 in the midst of rising unemployment among blacks, rapid urbanisation of the black population, and increasing militancy against the regime1. The government promoted family planning services as a measure to improve the health of women and their children; it also acknowledged that the programme was a way to place a check on the high population growth rate which was burdening limited resources. The government did not implement the programme on a racial basis. Services were provided free to any woman who sought them. However, the link between the family planning programme and white fears of growing black numbers was widely acknowledged. Accusations were lodged against family planning that it was a dubious programme of control with genocidal undertones while supporters prophesied an imminent (black) population explosion which demanded immediate and decisive action by the government. Yet while the political climate surrounding fertility control had been at best hostile prior to the early 1990s, the programme in fact had been 'successful' on several dimensions. [/quote]

[quote]Black community leaders have been tremendously influential in mobilising or suspending action among their constituencies on a wide variety of issues. Their opinions about family planning had the potential of creating a conducive or hostile environment for reproductive decision-making. These leaders also have almost always been men. The complexity of gender relations in South Africa, varying considerably across regions and within urban and rural settings, and coupled with high levels of censorship, makes a detailed assessment of family planning at the community level challenging. Media reports, however, indicate a high level of hostility to family planning, both because of the concern over population numbers implied by the programme, and because many saw fertility control as an affront to (male) authority and counter to the 'African' way of life. Relatively little concern was expressed for the health or well-being of women and their children or for the role of men in the maintenance of their families. In 1982, for example, the African Communist, a paper issued from London by the[b] South African Communist Party, ran an article entitled:[/b]

[b] 'Family Planning in South Africa-a Kind of Genocide': ...The so-called national family planning programme is being used to perpetuate White domination and the oppression and exploitation of the Black majority.. .In the South African context family planning tramples on rights of the oppressed Black majority and the hostility with which the oppressed majority have reacted to this policy is a direct result of the historical experience of racist White minority rule which has systematically robbed them of the land and the liberty and is now intent on restricting their right to reproduce themselves. The people's rejection of population control is part of their strategy for self-preservation. (Hansard 1983, c.283-4).[/b][/quote]

[quote]
 Several more specific controversies surrounding the family planning programme did not work to allay community suspicion. Depo-Provera, a long- lasting injectable contraceptive, was a major focus of criticism. Depo was received with enthusiasm by medical doctors in the late 1960s (Tyler 1968; Karstadt 1970; Ferguson 1974), and its convenience as a contraceptive method lasting for up to three
months was immediately recognised by the family planning programme. [b]Striking differences in contraceptive method use patterns by race quickly appeared. In the late 1980s the injection was the method administered to over 50 per cent of all black users and 40 per cent of coloured, while the pill and sterilisation predominated among Indian and white users. The degree to which black and coloured women, especially in rural areas, had a choice of methods presented to them was questionable (see also Chimere-Dan 1993). With the Federal Drug Administration's ban on Depo in the United States, many critics of the programme accused it of subjecting black South African women to dangerous chemicals to achieve demographic objectives (SAIRR 1980). The national programme did not attempt to cancel or limit the use of the method.[/b]

The injection was a long lasting form of fertility control that did not require consent or co-operation of a woman's partner or in- laws. For women who feared disapproval, the injectable contraceptive was an ideal choice (Gready et al 1994; Kaufman 1994). Abuses of contraception related to employment were also a source of controversy.[b] Employment opportunities were limited for black South African women and most positions were not suited to the 'inconveniences' of child-bearing or child care.[/b] Women who became pregnant often lost their jobs. As one worker commented (in Barrett, et al. 1985, p.142): 'If someone knows you are pregnant, they will run to the nursing sister and tell her - so that you are fired, and they know someone who can take your place.'[b] While many women sought contra- ception to keep their jobs, others had no choice. In some instances contraceptive use became a pre- condition for hire and for continued employment.[/b] Women who did become pregnant had no guarantee of a job after the birth of a child. They were also susceptible to 'influx' control laws under which they could be judged 'unproductive' and sent to the appropriate homeland. Another widespread practice known as 'the fourth stage of labour', involved administering an injection immediately post-partum (Klugman 1993; Stockton 1995). The rationale for this practice is unknown, since women are usually anovulatory for several months after delivery. Nonetheless, nurses usually provided the injection as a matter of procedure. Permission from the patient was not sought generally, although sometimes the patient received the explanation that the 'baby will be healthier' (Mamosadi 1995). One young woman described her experience (in Klugman 1988:102): 'I used it after delivering my baby. I was taken there and given an injection without being told anything. They only took my blood pressure and gave me the next date for a check up.'
[/quote]

Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-Apartheid South Africa

[quote]This recent politicization of sexuality is unexpected and enigmatic.
It was not foretold in most, if not all, the major policy documents
and debates which accompanied South Africa's transition. The
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which was the
initial policy framework of the African National Congress affirmed on
its election to office in 1994, for example, made copious reference to
issues of gender, seen largely as the need to 'empower' women (extend

widen their access to social and economic opportunities)But there
was little sense of the political salience of the domain of sexuality,
other than reference to the need for improved mental healths services
for 'those affected by ... rape or child abuse' (ANC 1994: para.
2.12.7.2). [b]By contrast, one of the public policy debates where the issue
of the politics of sexuality was raised- but then seemingly immediately
and strategically backgrounded- was in respect of a post-apartheid
population policy. The apartheid state's notoriously crude efforts to
manipulate black fertility made it difficult for the new regime to deal
with matters of sexuality within the rubric of a legitimate national
population policy;hence the concern in the post-apartheid White Paper
on Population Policy, which shaped the production of the new policy, to
frame issues of reproductive health and fertility with reference to their
wider 'developmental'  parameter(sR SA 1998:p ara. 1.3).[/b]

Nor was the potentials salience of the politics of sexuality prominently
signalled within the analytical frameworks which shaped the contours of
academic analysis of the country's recent history and debates about its
likely future. Much of the academic commentary on the latter years of
apartheid and the character of the country's transition drew more or less
explicitly on Marxist( and sometimes Weberian) theory- foregrounding
questions of the intersections of race and class, and, with that, the
politics of inequality. The issue of gender has some salience, particularly
among feminist scholars arguing for the need to factor gender in
to the 'race-class' theoretical mix. But concerns with the politics of
gender seldom encompassed issues of sex and sexuality. The politics
of sexuality, therefore, was typically marginal in, or absent from, this
corpus of writings.'The more descriptive commentaries on the manner
of the country's transition and its likely future problems picked up on
issues such as political violence, crime and policing, education reform,
affirmative action and minority rights,along with economic inequality,
economic growth and unemployment,2with very little expectation of
major social and political conflict around the question of sex and
sexuality. Leading decision-makers seem to have been surprised
by, and unprepared for, the prominence of sexuality on the agenda of
national debate and the political heat which it has fanned.
[/quote]

[quote]Within Mbeki's discursive schema, the judgement this would pass
is as global as it is national. Indeed, global discourses about AIDS
intensify the impulses to deny the sexualization of death in a country
newly liberated from its colonial past - indeed, in the African country
upheld in many parts of the world as the democratic miracle, the
beacon of hope. [b]Susan Sontag (1990) has underlined the profoundly
metaphorical character of the AIDS epidemic in the West: what AIDS
does to the individual body has widely been read as a reflection on what
the epidemic does to the social body, punishing moral transgressions,
subverting the project of modernity and reinstating racist invectives
against the 'primitivism' of Africa. Succumbing to AIDS at the moment
of national 'rebirth' risks the reiteration of these metaphorical renditions
of the disease within the global polity - the bigger stage on which the
'African Renaissance' has been scripted.[/b]
In short, in terms of Mbeki's rhetoric of nation-building, to admit
to the enormity of the epidemic would be to reinstate the imagery of
the 'abyss', the 'African nightmare' and the death, disintegration and
contamination which Mbeki associates with it. Indeed, the imagery
of sexuality which Mbeki associates with the orthodox rendition of
HIV/AIDS is the spectre of the past: the colonial nightmare which
imprisoned the black mind, enslaved the black body and degraded the
pursuit of pleasure. It is exactly that which the African Renaissance has
to vanquish: the demon within 'our African selves'.[/quote]